


until the day breathes

by LittleMissWolfie



Series: her banner over me is love [1]
Category: Havenfall is for Lovers (Visual Novel)
Genre: Because I feel like it's the same kind of vibe, Coming of Age, Especially when I found out Vanessa is Jewish, F/F, F/M, Gen, I based Havenfall in this off the town I grew up in in southern IL, I just really wanted to write this, I might continue with the rest of Mac's route if y'all like it!, I'm not Jewish though so if I got anything wrong feel free to yell at me, If it's really distracting I'll change it, Implied/Referenced Antisemitism, Menstruation, Possible overuse of pronouns instead of names but hey it's about identity, i think???, jewish main character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-20
Updated: 2019-07-20
Packaged: 2020-07-09 12:07:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19887484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleMissWolfie/pseuds/LittleMissWolfie
Summary: Her god knows her as Kelila. In public, she is Laurel. It is a delicate balance, but one she must maintain.





	until the day breathes

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, so Lovestruck has ruined my life with this butch werewolf sheriff and I had to write this. Let me know what you think!

She grows up with two names.

Her god knows her as Kelila, daughter of Gili, granddaughter of Ziva, older sister of Chen. She is Kelila in private, and only to her mother and grandmother and sister. Even her father does not call her by that name. Sometimes he calls her mother “Gili,” though it is always clumsy, foreign on his goy tongue.

In public, she is Laurel, and her sister is Grace, and her mother is Joy. Her grandmother has no other name. She is always Ziva. In that way, she is like Kelila’s father; he is only James, never anything else. Once, she asks her mother why she and Chen have two names, and her mother smiles in a way that does not reach her eyes and says it is to protect them from people like their father but not, who have only one name but fear or dislike those with two. And Kelila doesn’t understand, but she also doesn’t push.

And so she is both Kelila and Laurel. She is Laurel at school, when she learns to write her Ls and Rs in cursive to sign her homework, when she introduces herself to people in town. But she is Kelila when she prays with her mother and grandmother and sister, when she reads and writes with the script in the Torah, on Shavuot and Hanukkah and everything in between.

It is a delicate balance, but one she must maintain.

*

She is always vaguely aware of the Hunt family. Havenfall is a small town, after all; almost everyone knows each other in some capacity. So even though she’s never met the Hunts, she knows Mrs. Hunt is black and Mr. Hunt is white and they farm and they have a daughter who is neither black nor white.

Then, one summer, her mother and father sign her up for softball.

She is seven and has never been athletically inclined. She prefers to stand in the kitchen with her grandmother while she cooks and listen to the stories of their people from before they had to have two names. Her glasses, still new to her after complaining of headaches and blurry vision for the last few months, are too big on her, and they fall of if she tilts her head too far down. She is not interested in playing softball.

But her parents are concerned. She isn’t making friends as easily as her sister, who flirts between social groups at town gatherings like she belongs everywhere. Her sister is only two years old, coming up rapidly upon three, but she talks a mile a minute, both in English and in Hebrew, and interactions with her always leave adults and kids alike smiling. They talk to each other in low tones when they think she isn’t listening, and they think being in an activity like softball, which is the only sport for girls her age in Havenfall, would help with her social skills.

She doesn’t kick up a fuss about it, because her grandmother promises to teach her how to make shakshuka when she gets back from practice. So she lets her mother braid her hair back away from her face and wears the too-loose cleats her father bought from a secondhand store the next town over and makes the ten minute trek to Havenfall’s baseball field.

And there she meets Mackenzie.

Mackenzie is very pretty, she thinks. Her eyes are like emeralds, her hair like straw, her skin like bronze. She is eleven, four years older than herself, but she doesn’t act like being older makes her better. They won’t play on the same team because Mackenzie is so much older, but the ten to twelve year olds have the practice slot right before seven through nine, and she likes to watch the other kids practice. Mackenzie shows her how to hold her bat correctly and stays after practice to teach her how to run.

There’s a funny feeling in her chest. She still doesn’t like softball, but she likes Mackenzie and her attention, so she’ll keep coming.

*

The funny feeling in her chest begins to fade when they have to go back to school, because she is still in elementary school and Mackenzie is at the middle school. She does not attempt to make friends like her parents encourage her to, but she pretends, to alleviate their worries. So Laurel talks to classmates and swaps lunches and goes to birthday parties, and Kelila works in the kitchen with her grandmother and thinks about how wonderful the color green is.

*

The first time she sees blood in her underwear, she is eight and terrified out of her mind.

Her belly has been feeling funny for a while now, so she asks her teacher, Mrs. Robin, if she could please go to the bathroom please. The little place up between her legs feels full the way her belly does when she has to go pee, but instead of it being tight, it feels swollen, and she ends up waddling to the end of the hallway to the bathroom. When she pulls down her jeans to sit on the toilet and sees the crimson stain on her undies, she screams.

Her grandmother comes to pick her up from school in the green minivan they reserve for special occasions because gas prices in Havenfall are high. Her younger sister is strapped into her booster seat looking like her birthday came early because she gets to go on a car ride. Her grandmother smiles at her as she climbs into the van and sits down.

“Am I dying?” she asks very seriously.

“No,” says her grandmother. “This is natural, _mami._ Your bleeding means you are becoming a woman. It happened to me, and to your mother, and to every woman who has come before us and will come after us.”

“Why do we bleed like this?”

“It is our bodies’ way of preparing for babies. It will come every month unless you are pregnant, and it will stop when you are too old to have babies.”

She scrunches up her face. “So I should have a baby if I don’t want to bleed?”

“Just because your body thinks it is ready does not mean your mind or your soul are ready for a baby. When you are older and find a good man to marry, then you will be ready.”

To herself, she thinks she might not want to marry a man, but she says nothing for the rest of the ride home.

*

She ends up skipping fourth grade and going right to fifth, which does nothing for her social prospects. The older kids already have established relationships and a wholly different culture than what she’s used to, and they don’t care to catch the younger girl up on any of it. At least she had people to talk to before. Now, there’s no one.

The teachers do try to intervene, to be fair. It’s just that kids don’t really care what their teachers think of their social lives. So she thanks her home room teacher for trying to help and focuses on her schoolwork. If she can’t have good friends, she’ll at least have good grades.

*

No one asks her to the eighth grade formal, but she goes anyway. Her mother and grandmother make her a dress the same color as the sky at twilight, and she curls her hair and puts on lipgloss that tastes like cherries. Her sister tells her she looks like a princess.

She dances with a boy named Mark from her pre algebra class because he asks. He’s cute, she thinks; athletic, tanned from farm work, with brown eyes. He puts his hands on her waist and she puts hers on his shoulders and they sway to the sound of the slow version of “Every Time We Touch,” and it’s not unpleasant.

It’s not Mark’s fault she’s thinking about a girl three years older than him with emerald eyes and straw colored hair.

*

The next year, she turns thirteen.

They don’t get to have a proper bat-mitzvah for her. There aren’t enough people in town who know she should have one. So she dresses in a nice dress and the family drives to Indianapolis to visit a temple and have a good dinner. When they get home, she reads from the Torah and they eat babka she helped her grandmother make, and that’s all she really needs.

*

She is actually a little happy she ended up skipping a grade, because that means she and Mackenzie get to be in high school together.

Mackenzie is a senior when she is a freshman, and she doesn’t think Mackenzie remembers her, so she watches from afar. She goes to varsity softball games to see Mackenzie play, and she eats lunch on the aluminum bleachers because Mackenzie likes to work out on the football field when she finishes her food.

It feels strange to watch in silence, but Mackenzie is from a world entirely apart from hers. It’s like stargazing; she’s watching something beautiful happen in a place she cannot hope to reach.

Mackenzie graduates in May.

*

Her parents die in July.

A car accident, police say.The windshield is smashed and the front end of the car is crumpled like a tissue around the trunk of the old pine tree they crashed into. The coroner says they probably didn’t live long past the impact. She supposes that should be reassuring.

As their way dictates, neither of her parents are embalmed, and they are buried in simple wooden caskets. No one else comes to the burial; there is no other family to come.

The community sends condolences in the weeks that follow. They seem empty. They didn’t care much about her parents while they were alive. They only care now that they’re dead.

Her grandmother tells her and her sister how proper funerals are done, about shiva and sheloshim and yahrtzeit. At night, her sister crawls into bed with her and asks her to never die.

She doesn’t think about Mackenzie much after that. She doesn’t have the time to.

*

Her grandmother manages to make it past her sister’s thirteenth birthday, for which she is incredibly grateful. Her sister deserves some amount of happiness, after all. She drives her sister and grandmother to the temple in Indianapolis in the truck she bought with her meager savings when she turned sixteen. The truck is at least as old as her, and probably older, but she bought it with money she earned and she loves it.

Her sister reads from the Torah when they get home, and they eat babka, and they try to ignore the two people who should be here but are not.

*

She is nineteen when her grandmother dies and she and her sister have to bury her. Because she has a full-time job, bowling alley or not, and she inherited the house they grew up in, she gets custody of her sister.

For years, she’s dreamed of leaving. Of packing up her things and moving out of Havenfall. But she can’t. Not with her sister. Seeing stability, not with high housing costs, not with the unstable job market. So she tells herself she’ll wait a few years, until after her sister goes to college. Then she’ll start looking for other jobs and new places.

Maybe then she can pick which name she wants.

She thinks that would be nice.

*

She goes on a few dates, with both guys and girls, but none of them really stick. After three consecutive suitors with varying shades of green eyes, she starts to suspect she has a type.

But Mackenzie is still unreachable. She’s the sheriff now, she knows; her straw colored hair is cropped short and her muscles ripple under her uniform shirt and pants with every graceful move she makes. Mackenzie is beautiful and strong and so far away from anything she could ever hope for. So she decides to just not hope.

She tells herself the next date might go better.

*

It’s the summer before her sister leaves for college. They are both working every day to save up money for the payment plan for her sister’s tuition and room and board. Her sister tells her she should ask Razi for a raise because she has worked for him for so long, but she never does. She doesn’t feel like the work she does at the bowling alley deserves much more than she’s already getting paid.

One day, she drops her sister off for work at the diner, and she spills coffee on Mackenzie, and she doesn’t know it yet, but this spill is a catalyst for many things to come.

*

Her sister is gone.

She is the only family she has left, and she is gone. Luce says she probably ran away, but she knows better. She’s all her sister has left, too.

So she goes to the sheriff.

She goes to Mackenzie.

*

She sees Mackenzie’s cruiser in the middle of nowhere and makes a beeline to it. Any sane person would be asleep right now, and if Mackenzie’s using the cruiser, it could mean she has a lead on her sister, and that’s all she cares about right now.

But what she sees under the moonlight changes her world forever.

It turns out her family isn’t the only one in Havenfall with a secret.


End file.
